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78’s Box

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I was so tempted by this old 78’s record box at the car boot this morning but it was too pricey for me. The discs in sleeves flipped out at a 45 degree angle but it only held 12″ discs and I have mostly 10″ ones. I’ve never seen one like this before and I’ve collected 78’s for decades and it was in really lovely condition, possibly 1930’s.

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  6. Back in the pre-sexual intercourse days, a dark blue naugahyde-clad box with a big handle and neat litte brass hinges sat under the coffee table in the front room bay window. Resting on the top was a small cranked handle which could be inserted into an opening at the side of the box.

    Opening up the box the inside of the lid revealed a lovely little illustration of a terrier listening to a very similar gramophone, but one with a big brass horn speaker. The little dog’s head was slightly cocked as he concentrated on the sound. The base of the unit had a splendid green baize covered turntable with a tone arm that weighed as much as a pocket battleship. The box lid formed a surface designed to throw the sound out across the room – there was no big curved horn on this model, this was a thoroughly modern device.

    In the shelf under the writing bureau in the same room sat a thick pile of 78 r.p.m. discs, all 10 inch shellacs. There were even more in the dining room cupboard, stacked atop the wide format Rowlandson books beneath the china cabinet. I spent many happy hours winding up the little gramophone and sampling the discs, selected almost at random though I did have a few favourites. They were a healthy selection of classical works, mostly short chamber pieces. A single symphonic movement might be spread across 3 or 4 sides, which somewhat lessens the accumulated effect of the music. There were also a good number of contemporary ‘popular’ artists from the pre-war years. My all-time favourites were The Teddy Bear’s Picnic from ‘Uncle Mac’ and a lively Hall Of The Mountain King.

    All of this delight ceased when I over-wound the main spring one day. A humungous ‘dang!’ sounded, and the spring powered turntable turned no more. I was bereft. Mum was a trifle miffed, but secretly probably pretty relieved to think that she wouldn’t have to listen any more to the refrain that started, “If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise…” which she’d probably heard four or five times every morning since I had been allowed to use the thing when I’d become strong enough to wind it up, at around the age of 3. On his return from work Dad was a lot more miffed, as the gramophone had been a present from his mum & dad. Even so, he never did get around to having it fixed, largely I suspect because we’d started renting a television from a shop in town, and our multimedia enjoyment now came largely from the BBC. Having also forked out for a second TV aerial to accomodate the signal from the ITV company, he wasn’t minded to also splurge the cost of a repair bill from the local music shop.

    The gramophone cabinet, robust lumps of mahogany, became re-purposed for one of dad’s wood working DIY projects, and the shellac discs were all donated to Plymouth Hospital Radio, who eagerly took them, finding that the collection contained many recordings for which they’d received requests from patient listeners, but been previously unable to source.

    It took nearly another decade before a replacement record player appeared in the house, and five years after that before anything approaching hi-fi lived in our front room.

    I’ve been making up for this ever since.

  11. I once bought a batch of 78s and in it was an album that had “Uncle Otto’s Records” written on it. Inside were birdsong recordings of canaries, whistling records, accordion oom-pah-pah polkas and lugubrious sad songs about mothers. I like Uncle Otto.

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